Please don’t go down sun. I don’t want to go out there. I want to stay inside, listening to Arvo Pärt, weeping the way a roll of burning toilet paper weeps at the bottom of the ocean, weeping as statues weep, weeping the old Babylonian statutes, weeping weeping weeping, wag wag wag. Do you know that I had a dream once when Austin was in Patagonia with Constantin? I did! I did! And in it, I was on the roof of the garage, the little yellow garage where my life started. I was up on the roof in the night, all grown up, with Oscar, my dead Airedale. We were up on the roof of the garage having a conversation. He forgave me for not being around when they killed him. I’ll put it more Arvo Pärt—for not being around when he died. I was very peaceful. He was very peaceful. We were up on the roof of the little yellow garage where my life started, speaking telepathically. I was so happy to see him again! I was so happy to Speak With Him again. I wasn’t around when he died. I was drinking poison in Kaohsiung, reading Tim is going crazy, opening packages from Tim filled with ranting robot scripture and black balloons, Tim snapping from amphetamines and computer science, writing cognizant and mournfully—I realize that logic is love without a body. Gone to Love with a broken mind, spouting the Napoleonic code with nine brass screws in his steel-toe boots, drinking pig’s blood and exorcizing the aspirin with vinegar. Tim lost and Oscar in a box on the mantle.
How about this one? One time, this was well after I stopped being a Human Being, this was when I had My Own Basement Apartment, I was walking, I was walking both as 1) a mode of transport and 2) something to do when you are no longer a Human Being. I was walking up 400 South—which I always considered a ley line of total inhumanity, Berlin Wall of the plainest suburb, a linear vortex, a linear anti-Nothing, a retail Leviathan on the scale of Payless Shoes, a Nothing that is. I was on the south side of the street heading towards the parking lot. There was the coffee shop where the Human Beings congregate to spawn and congratulate one another on their latest plumbing triumphs. And there, on the patio, facing me, alone in the smoking section, was my father. My father is a very, very, very successful lawyer. Up by the bootstraps kind of guy, only they didn’t start him off on a horse. Only this man was even more worn out, balder, in cheap denim, dressed like an off duty biker, smoking a cigarette to boot. I couldn’t understand what had come over him. I smiled but he didn’t respond. I went through the gate onto the patio and walked straight towards him, but he didn’t recognize me! He didn’t even seem to notice that his own Firstborn Son was walking straight up to him with love smeared across his face like a thrown pie. And then I realized it wasn’t my father. It was no hallucination. The man was real, and I hope you realized by now that this isn’t some plodding maggoty fiction, some juju clockwork sophistry. The man was real, in the real world, and I walked right up to him. But it wasn’t my father. It was What My Father Could Have Been. An iteration so convincing your own son won’t be able to tell. This experience gave me a very unsettled feeling. I began to wonder about choices, about the interstices of reason and volition, about self-sacrifice and genetic altruism. What if my father had dreamed of Nothing? What if he had? What if he was just plain stronger than I was, and had been ferocious and uncompromising when Nothing came around, like Roland fifteen miles out to sea, surrounded by sharks. What would I be if my father had been Gary Busey instead of Roland, or the kind of guy who’d drink bleach or turpentine or cut off his thumbs to get out of the Red Army? Where would She be? Or Tim, where would He be if I had been born the son of a coward instead of the son of a statue rolling down a mountainside, a ghost so frightening it could prevent the king's assassination? I look into the black eye of the whale and I see the orbits alter; the trajectories warp like a line of sediment settling. And what of my children? What of the millions I washed down the drain in five-dollar rooms, or squirted into assholes and faces, shook off on walls, wiped off with dirty socks or a velour blanket punctured with cigarette holes? Where will they have been had I not gone swimming fifteen miles out to sea? Where will they have found me groveling for nickels or hauling a handcart full of cardboard and empty bottles? I am a very bad Jew, but I am trying.
Andrew Haley’s poems, short stories and translations have appeared in Western Humanities Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Zone, Quarterly West, The Smoking Poet, Stop Smiling, Otis Nebula and Sugar House Review.
Editor's note: This is Part 4 of a six-part series. We'll run a section each Monday through August 23.
Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5 and Part 6.
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